Since January 2000, the Miller Gallery has sought to support the creation,
growth, and understanding of contemporary art through exhibitions, projects,
events and publications. A non-collecting facility located in the Purnell
Center for the Arts on the main campus of Carnegie Mellon, the Gallery
is named for Regina Gouger Miller, alumna of the School of Art, avid art
collector, and generous principal donor. The 9,000 square foot space functions
less as a showroom for art, than one for experimentation, examination,
discovery and discussion. The gallery aspires to engage diverse audiences,
as well as to stimulate, provoke and encourage contemplation of the visual
arts of our times.

Plastic Poetics Exhibit at Carnegie Mellon’s Miller Gallery
Brings Sculptures and Installations from Four Artists
PITTSBURGH—Plastic
Poetics, a new exhibit featuring artists Ian Finch, Maya Schindler, Sarah Wood
and Colin Zaug, opens at Carnegie Mellon University’s Regina Gouger Miller
Gallery with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. on Jan. 18 and runs until Feb. 22.
Cara Erskine, exhibitions coordinator for the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, is
curating this exhibition.
“The
artists reconfigure raw, industrial materials to create art that is both of the
tactile world and beyond it, sharing a strange familiarity of language, shadows,
and artificial landscapes,” Erskine said.
Pittsburgher
Finch received degrees in book publishing and poetry from Geneva and Emerson
colleges and the University of Pittsburgh. He studied poetry and experimental
book arts in New Zealand as a U.S. Fulbright scholar. He contributes unconventional
Venn diagrams drawn directly on the Miller Gallery walls that visually represent
his poetry. Finch’s interconnected diagrams are on all three gallery floors.
Erskine said Finch’s Venn diagram poems were written in response to the
artists’ work.
Wood, who
lives and works in Brooklyn, contributes sculptures that are doubles or shadows
of everyday objects like house plants. All of Wood’s sculptures are made
of black, synthetic materials such as rubber, vinyl and plastic that lend an
apocalyptic quality to the doubles. “I’m disrupting the order of
events,” Wood writes in her statement. “At times it’s a process
of separation — disconnect a window from it’s shadow, and an ordinary
houseplant becomes a silhouette. In other instances it’s cumulative, the
working together of conflicting elements, an unfamiliar connection.”
Los Angeles artist Schindler’s sculptures consist of letters that have
been carved into shapes and painted and then layered on top of each other. The
words are given new and different meaning through the physical expression of
the sculpture. From the artist statement, her work “suggests that understanding
is always fully in doubt, but it still understands. I try to guide you into this
revelation with humor, strangeness and a dose of the familiar.”
Zaug is represented
by an inflatable landscape that was constructed at the Miller Gallery. Visitors
can enter Zaug’s installation and view the gallery from within the world
Zaug has created. Zaug attended the Rhode Island School of Design and the University
of Victoria. His work has been exhibited across the United States and in Canada.
Plastic Poetics
is Erskine’s first curatorial project. Recent exhibitions of her own work
include a solo exhibition at Tunnel Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA and in group shows
at Front Room Gallery, Cleveland, OH, and Jenny Jaskey Gallery, Philadelphia,
PA.
Images of
the artists’ work are online at http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/.
For more information, visit http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/.
The gallery, which is located in the Purnell Center for the Arts, is open Tuesday
through Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.